Isaiah 58:13

Isaiah 58 is a rebuke of empty religion. The people fast, bow their heads and lie in sackcloth, and all the while they oppress others and quarrel (Isaiah 58:3–4). God answers that the fast he has chosen is “to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke” (Isaiah 58:6), and to share bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into one’s house and clothe the naked (Isaiah 58:7). That is the setting of the whole chapter (Isaiah 58:1–12).

Verse 13 brings the same test to the Sabbath. A person can stop work for a day and still spend the day on himself. God looks for a heart that gives the day to him, joined to the justice and mercy he has just described (Isaiah 58:6–7).

The Sabbath was central to Israel’s life and worship. God rested on the seventh day at creation and blessed it (Genesis 2:2–3), he gave it to Israel in the fourth commandment (Exodus 20:8–11), and he made it a sign between himself and his people (Exodus 31:13–17). Keeping it well was part of covenant faithfulness to the Holy One of Israel, and the blessings of verse 14 echo the covenant blessings of Deuteronomy 28. Long after Isaiah, Nehemiah had to reform the way Jerusalem kept the day (Nehemiah 13:15–22), which shows how easily ordinary business crowds in on holy time.

“If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath” is a Hebrew idiom. The foot stands for a person’s course and actions, and to turn it away from the Sabbath is to stop trampling on the day, treating holy time as common ground for one’s own errands. The next words explain it: “from doing thy pleasure on my holy day”. God calls it “my holy day”, so the whole question is whose day it is, and he answers that it is his.

The word for pleasure, chêphets, means pleasure, delight, desire or wish, and it can also mean a matter or a purpose. So “doing thy pleasure” covers both what a person enjoys and the affairs he has in hand, his business included. The same word comes back near the end of the verse in “nor finding thine own pleasure”.

The verse closes with three things to leave aside, each marked “thine own”. The first is “thine own ways”. The word derek is a road or path, and figuratively a course of life or a way of acting, so here it means a person’s usual routine, plans and work. The second is “thine own pleasure”, chêphets again. The third is “speaking thine own words”. The noun dâbâr means a word or speech, and in a separate sense a matter, affair or thing, and it is related to the verb dâbar, to speak. The Hebrew reads simply “speaking a word”, and the KJV supplies “thine own” to give the sense. Talk counts as well as work. The idle chatter of the week, the planning of business and the conversation that pulls the mind away from God all belong to the other days, and on the Sabbath even our speech is given to him.

The repeated “thine own” shows where the trouble lies. Each of these things is ordinary and proper on other days. On God’s day self is set aside so that the LORD is honoured, and the whole person, feet, plans, desires and tongue, is turned toward him.

Between the things to leave aside stands what God asks for: “call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable”. To call it a delight is to declare it and count it a joy, a day of refreshment and satisfaction that a person looks forward to. God wants his people glad of his day, and gladness is something only the heart can give.

“The holy of the LORD” says the day is set apart for him alone. “Honourable” means weighty and glorious, worthy of the highest respect. Then the verse names the one who is really honoured: “and shalt honour him”. The day is precious because it belongs to the LORD, and the way his people treat it shows what they think of him.

Verse 14 answers verse 13 with “Then”. The one who calls the Sabbath a delight will delight in the LORD himself. The verb ʻânag comes from a root meaning to be soft or pliable, and figuratively to live in luxury, so to delight oneself in the LORD is to take rich and settled pleasure in him. A person who lays down his own pleasure on God’s day is given a better one, God himself. The psalm says the same: “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (Psalm 37:4).

This joy grows out of a life that honours God, in the Sabbath and in the justice and compassion the chapter has called for. It is the reward the whole chapter has been moving toward, and it is the first of the three blessings because it is the greatest: people who honour him find their joy in him.

“I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth” is a picture of exaltation and safety. The word bâmâh means a height or elevation. Elsewhere it often names the hilltop sites where people worshipped, sometimes wrongly, and it was also used for positions of prominence. Here it is the heights of the land, and God promises to carry his people over them like a rider, secure, honoured and victorious, above their enemies and far from the exposed lowlands. Moses sang of Israel with the same words: “He made him ride on the high places of the earth” (Deuteronomy 32:13).

God is the one who lifts them, and James gives the same order for believers: “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up” (James 4:10). The height God gives is measured by his care, protection and favour, and these steady a believer in trials and against temptation whatever his wealth may be.

“Feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father” promises provision from an inheritance. The word nachălâh means an inheritance, an estate or a portion handed down. Jacob’s heritage is what God promised the patriarchs: land, descendants and blessing, given to Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3) and renewed to Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28:13–15). To be fed with it is to live on that land and eat its fruit as God’s people, with all the covenant favour that went with it. Isaiah goes on to describe the coming glory of Zion in Isaiah 60.

The promise closes with its guarantee. What the LORD says, he does. Scripture puts it plainly: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19). The blessings of verse 14 rest on God’s own word, and that word makes them certain.

The verse speaks first of the seventh-day Sabbath that Israel kept, and the heart it asks for belongs to every believer: time set apart for God, rest from our own pursuits, delight in him, and honour given to him with our time and our speech. Believers differ on how the day itself carries over to the church. Many keep the Lord’s Day, Sunday, as their day of rest and worship and bring this verse to it. Some keep the seventh day still. Others take Paul’s words that the Sabbath days “are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:16–17) to free them from any one day, and they give God set times in other rhythms of life. All of them agree that God’s time is to be kept for God, and kept with joy.

The Sabbath was a shadow, and Christ is its substance. Jesus said, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27), and he claimed the day as his own: “Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath” (Mark 2:28). The Pharisees had made the day a set of outward rules, much as Isaiah’s hearers had made their fasting a display. Jesus healed and set people free on the Sabbath (Luke 13:10–17), showing that mercy and restoration belong to the day, as Isaiah 58 had already said.

Jesus is also the one who kept this verse perfectly. He said, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34), and his joy was in his Father’s will. Through his death and resurrection believers are raised up and made to “sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6), with the Christ whom God set “Far above all principality, and power” (Ephesians 1:20–21). Those are the highest of all high places.

Christ is our rest as well. “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:9–10). The words “his own works” answer the “thine own” of Isaiah 58:13, and Jesus calls, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28–30). The Word who was in the beginning and was made flesh (John 1:1–14) is the surest proof that what the mouth of the LORD has spoken comes to pass.

God asks for a day and gives himself. The things this verse asks us to lay down, our ways, our pleasures and our words, are good gifts on their own days, and on his day we set them aside because he is better. Whatever day you keep, you can keep it as his: rest from your own pursuits, worship with his people, do the works of mercy Isaiah 58 calls for, and let your talk turn to him. Kept that way the day becomes a delight, and the LORD’s own promise stands behind it: “Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD.”